Scott Bredin, Ingrid Winterbach and Jan Henri Booyens at the NSA
Scott Bredin's exhibition of recent paintings and drawings, titled 'Paintings and Drawings 2000-2003', aims to produce work that is convincing both as abstract form and empirical experience of the world. His paintings have their genesis in drawings done in the landscape and are the result of repeated visits to particular places over an extended period of time.
Underpinning the work is the conviction that the 'Western' landscape tradition is a resource to be mined rather than written off as a tool of colonisation and settler acquisitiveness. Instead of insisting on the bleakness of an environmental history that tracks the procession of exploration, colonisation and exploitation of the planet, these paintings and drawings cultivate a more complex story that shows the limits of such critiques and in so doing reveals the richness and antiquity of our landscape myths.
Scott Bredin completed a Masters of Arts in Fine Arts (cum laude) at the University of Natal. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, and his work is represented in corporate and public collections, including the Tatham Art Gallery and Barkley Bank PLC. He currently lives and works in Durban.
In the Mezzanine and Park Galleries Ingrid Winterbach shows 'Remember me/ Is all I ask'. Here she addresses issues of display, displacement, relocation and documentation of the human form. Most of the series of drawings depict bottled and dissected objects and organs (e.g. the human heart), and female portraits (circa 1815). Some of the works are annotated and reworked prints by Francois le Vaillant, an early traveller in South Africa (1781-1784).
Winterbach queries what happens to the status of an object or person when it is removed from its site of origin, when it is discomposed and repositioned. She questions what happens when it is redefined, relocated and reframed - either by the confines of a bottle, a sheet of paper, the pages of a book, or the walls of a museum or gallery. Collected and displaced specimens can be read as mementos, remembrances or relics, also as trophies or desecrations depending on the politics of ownership.
Ingrid Winterbach has always been active as both a writer and visual artist. After doing a BA Fine Arts at Wits and a Masters in Afrikaans literature at Stellenbosch University, she lectured in the Stellenbosch Department of Creative Arts for 13 years. She has participated in various group shows since 1978, the last being 'Outpost II' at the University of Stellenbosch Gallery last year. This is her second solo exhibition. She has published seven novels, five under the pseudonym Lettie Viljoen, the two most recent under her own name. She has won major literary awards, including the W.A. Hofmeyer Prize for Buller se Plan. She is currently busy with her first novel in English. Previous work can be viewed at www.ingridwinterbach.com
Jan-Henri Booyens 'Minor Acts of Violence' is in the Multimedia Room. It is the first instalment in the Young Artists' Project (YAP) 2003, funded by the National Lotteries Distribution Trust Fund. Booyens is currently completing his B-Tech degree in Fine Arts at the Durban Institute of Technology. Previously he spent a year as an undergraduate at the Gerrit Rietfelt Akademie in Amsterdam before commencing his studies in Durban.
Booyens has participated in numerous group exhibitions and also collaborated widely on video works with other artists. He recently took part in 'Edge', a production of video art, fashion and dance under the directorship of Jay Pather at the Playhouse Theatre. He presented a series of single channel, cinema style screenings of his work.
Working largely in new media and digital platforms, including video, animation and sound installations, Booyens is concerned with notions of 'organised' chaos and disturbance - either aural or visual - and the 'static' created by these frictions. Creating an anti-aesthetic his art is informed by the construction of complicated conceptual and physical booby traps for the viewer.
Booyens describes his work as employing "techniques of disturbance and discomfort as a means of exposing the underlying tensions contained in South African social structures". In doing this he uncovers aspects of tension his own personality. His installation will comprise a combination of video projections, a low frequency sound component and material objects.
All shows opening Tuesday 20 May 2003 at 6.00 p.m.
Opens: May 21
Closes: June 8
NSA Gallery, 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood
Tel: 031 202 3686
Fax: 031 202 3744
Email: iartnsa@mweb.co.za
Website: www.nsagallery.co.za
Hours: Tues - Fri 10am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 4pm, Sun 11am - 3pm
